


For The Ones Who Stand

by mistakeshavebeenmade



Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Asexual Character, Asexuality, Coming Out, F/M, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, give bossuet eight million hugs and a band-aid, musichetta is the queen of my heart, slight warning for acephobic language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-11
Updated: 2013-09-11
Packaged: 2017-12-26 07:28:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/963225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mistakeshavebeenmade/pseuds/mistakeshavebeenmade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>First, Bossuet pines.  Then, he confesses.  Then, he runs.</p><p>(Then, even though he’s falling a little too fast, they catch him.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	For The Ones Who Stand

His sexuality was just another one of those little quirks of fate that tended to happen around Bossuet, as far as he was concerned. While all of his classmates were developing crushes and jumping in and out of each other’s beds (and, in the more daring cases, back seats) he just…didn’t.

It wasn’t that he didn’t get crushes. No, those he had plenty of experience with.  He just didn’t understand why anyone wanted to take it past holding hands and curling up together in front of movies and slow, gentle kisses.  So he didn’t. And after one too many people who just didn’t understand how he could possibly want those things without wanting sex too, he stopped doing any of it.  It was just simpler that way.  Nobody got disappointed, nobody got hurt.  That was how he liked it.  And he could occasionally curl up with a friend, or a pillow, or a neighbor’s secret dorm cat, and be okay.

But then there was Joly.  Wonderful, cheerful Joly with his infectious laugh and his obsession with disease.  Bossuet was almost positive that there had been a time before he was in love with Joly, but he preferred not to think about it whenever he could.  It had just felt like a puzzle piece sliding into place, a hole that he’d never known he possessed filling immediately.

There were only two problems with his life after meeting Joly.  Well, to be fair, there were many more problems than that, including a never-ending string of car troubles, lost assignments, and the gradual disappearance of his hair (over which Joly worried for a solid week, until finally accepting Bossuet’s shrug and explanation of ‘extreme male pattern baldness’).  But out of the usual string of bad luck, shading to worse luck, only two were sufficiently out of the ordinary to avoid being brushed off with the rest.

First, Joly wasn’t like him.  He’d shared a room with him for long enough in college to be well aware of that.  And the first reason led right into the second:  Musichetta.

The worst part of it was that once he’d met her, he’d gradually fallen a little in love with her too.  How could he not?  She was all bright smiles and dancing eyes and good-natured teasing while Joly made sure his latest mishap hadn’t done him any lasting harm, and even if it hadn’t been for all those things, he would have loved her for the way she made Joly forget, for a minute or two, to worry, and the way she never, ever failed to take his worries seriously when they did happen.

He lived for the nights when all three of them fell asleep on the couch in their cramped apartment, and woke in a tangle of sleep-warm limbs and, in two of their cases, wild hair.  And even more, he lived for the few nights when he woke first, and could pretend, for a few minutes, that this was normal, and  _his_.  Eventually, one of his arms would fall asleep, or someone would wind up with an elbow poking them somewhere soft, or something else would happen to disturb one of them, and the illusion would shatter, but that was okay.  He’d been allowed to have it for a little while, and he could convince himself that it was enough, because it had always been enough.

It wasn’t enough.  But things didn’t go Bossuet’s way.  That was the way the universe worked.

* * *

 

Some part of him had thought that if he was aware that his life wasn’t perfect, or anywhere near what he wanted, he might be allowed to keep what he had.  Maybe, just once, the universe would throw him a bone.  He’d done what he always did, and convinced himself to be happy with his misfortune, and that would be the end of it.

Instead, it was ending.

He’d had just enough to drink the night before that the worried look Joly had given him was a little foggy, but not enough to have entirely forgotten the drunken confession that he wanted both of them to be his.  But not like that.  Never like that.  And the conversation he’d overheard while he was half dozing in one of the kitchen chairs, waiting for the glass of water Chetta was pouring, was completely clear of the haze that had fallen over the rest of the night.

"…could be something really serious, Chetta, we need to convince him to see a doctor.  He might have a tumor, or diabetes, or some kind of traumatic injury, or…"

After that, Chetta had set the glass of water in front of him, and he’d lost track of the thread of the conversation, but that had been enough.  Joly and Chetta weren’t any different from the people he’d tried to date in high school, and he couldn’t have stayed there a moment longer when he woke up the next morning, even if he hadn’t had classes to get to.  After class, he’d taken shameless advantage of his possession of a key to Combeferre’s apartment, one of the set his friends had given him in case of what Bahorel had cheerfully termed “Lesgle-related emergencies.”  Combeferre wouldn’t be back from his internship until late, he never was, so as long as Bossuet could avoid setting the toaster on fire, he’d never know that he had been hiding out there, working up the nerve to face his roommates.

"Bossuet, sometimes I’m afraid you’re less of an eagle, and more of a goose."

He wasn’t surprised by Musichetta breezing through Combeferre’s door.  Not because he’d expected to see her, but because he just wasn’t surprised by most of the things his luck threw at him any more.  He did, however, look up from the book he’d been determinedly attempting to read with a vaguely puzzled expression, because he was almost positive that Chetta hadn’t learned to walk through walls when he wasn’t looking.

"The next time you decide to run out on us, you’re going to have to work harder than this," she informed him as she settled on the other end of Combeferre’s overstuffed couch.  "Combeferre’s apartment is closest to campus, and his locks are terrible."  And that, coupled with the fact that she was sliding a pair of bobby pins back into her hair, really told him everything he needed to know.

"If you’re here to stage an intervention about my lack of a sex life, you should have brought Joly with you."

If he was being honest, he probably deserved the pillow Chetta threw at him.  After that, she was silent for a long moment, just staring at him thoughtfully, until he felt compelled to continue just to break the silence.  ”I know the two of you have decided I’m sick, or something, because of this, but just because I’m a little broken doesn’t mean…”

"Is that what you think?"  He couldn’t quite work out what the expression on Chetta’s face was, but there was none of the pity he’d expected to see there.  He hated looking at one of his friends and seeing pity for him on their faces, because if he didn’t feel bad about his lot in life, why should they?  But the look on Chetta’s face was something sharper, closer to anger than pity.  "You are far from being broken, mon aigle."

He intended to make some kind of retort to that, but somehow it was lost in the wake of Musichetta sweeping him up off of Combeferre’s couch, and out the door, talking the whole way.  ”Now, we’re going to go home and reassure Joly that you’re not laying on a park bench somewhere giving yourself pneumonia, and then we are going to let him apologize profusely for what he said last night, which I assure you I made him aware was emphatically not the case once you were safely in bed.  And then all three of us will retire to your most excellent bed, because I am positive that Joly’s will break if the three of us try to nap in it.  And tomorrow, we will work all of this out.”

* * *

 

Of course, it hadn’t gone exactly like that, because really, Musichetta should have known better than to try to plan Bossuet’s life.  Instead, they had no sooner walked through the front door than Joly was frantically herding him into the bathroom to warm up in a hot bath, thanks to the sudden chilly fall downpour they’d been caught in on the walk back.  Joly had, however, proceeded to station himself outside the bathroom door and proclaim, at some length, how sorry he was for getting carried away.  Bossuet couldn’t even find it in himself to be a little angry about the fact that Joly’s apology was loud enough that all of their neighbors could probably hear it.

After, however, he had found himself tucked into bed, with Joly’s hair tickling his nose and Musichetta pressing feather-light kisses to the back of his head.  And it was so very much better than anything he could have hoped for that he brushed his knuckles lightly against the wood of the headboard, just once, to try to change his luck, and had to close his eyes against tears for a long moment when both Musichetta and Joly quietly did the same.

**Author's Note:**

> Wrote this for ace amis week on Tumblr because I couldn’t not, and because opportunity to project onto fictional characters that I over-identify with whoo! (It’s unspecified, so you can read Bossuet as the ace identity of your choice here. Personally, my headcanon is demisexual, panromantic, and maybe I will expand on that one day.) Title comes from Comes And Goes by Greg Laswell, which I listened to on repeat while writing because I have a problem.


End file.
